I didn’t intend to share this before I could hatch a thoughtful marketing plan, but lately life has been happening almost faster than I can keep up. And now, here I am, hovering 30,000 feet over the eastern seaboard of Canada (wishing I had drafted this email weeks ago), sandwiched between two of my favorite people - my OG photographer, Erica, who started FOOD LA LA with me on my apartment floor, taping white poster boards to the back of my couch to create a “studio”; and my editor and sherpa, Kristin, who is annoyingly smart and will only half roll her eyes when she has to help her baby sister lug her 50 lb suitcase up steep and narrow European stairs - with five hours left in our journey.
Eight years ago, I flipped my life upside down. I quit my (very stable) job selling corporate insurance, dumped almost everything I owned into a storage unit, and spent a half year traveling solo through France to understand: 1) What is so special about the joie de vivre of French living and eating? and 2) How do they actually do it? To me, French anything, French everything, is a fascinating intersection of beauty and simplicity: a vibrant salad made somehow of only tomatoes and sea salt, a late August peach, so juicy and sweet, it can stand alone as dessert. No fuss, no stress, no mess, just good livin’.
For six months, I bounced between farmers and artisans, chefs and teachers, and filled tiny notebooks with handwritten notes to capture the stories, the food, the interstitial moments—like how they crushed up walnut shells and tossed them in the rose garden to keep the bugs at bay—and spent the last several years sifting through them to find the lessons, the so-whats, and the how-tos.
Those lessons, stories, and recipes have since morphed into chapters: discovering the basics of French cooking with a modern-day Julia Child at a Beauty and the Beast-esque storybook home tucked in a tiny village; selling tomatoes in French markets with a Norman farmer; harvesting grapes for an organic and biodynamic wine maker; taking my final exam at Le Cordon Bleu Paris; learning to use every bit of the plants and animals on a goose farm in Perigord; and beginning my love affair with French macarons at the pastry school adjacent to a nudist colony.
And those chapters have morphed into a cookbook.
And oh baby, I can’t wait for you to see the shiny, colorful, helpful and inspiring (I hope) final product. But more, I want you to share in the journey of its arrival. The messy in-between of what I imagine will be derailed travel plans (we haven’t even landed yet and it’s raining in Paris and the goose farm doesn’t have any geese), frustrating nights trying to sew together the words to retell these stories in the vivid detail in which I experienced them, the seemingly endless list of recipes to test (and test and retest), the quiet but omnipresent voice wondering if anybody other than me even cares.
And because we all know a cookbook without tons of beautiful, yet perfectly you-can-totally-recreate-this-yourself photos may as well be a paperweight, Erica, Kristin, and I are on our way to France to capture the lifestyle images: the wildly generous people and families who shared their homes, their farms, their knowledge, their savoir-faire, and their joy with me.
So, who’s publishing this book!?
In 2018 I signed with a New York based literary agent. She pitched my proposal to a long list of well-known publishing houses, and after a whole lotta rejections—We love the concept, writing, and photos but Lindsay doesn’t have a big enough audience—in 2020, I got my first offer.
My industry mentors remarked that the offer was unlike any they had ever seen. Record-setting, in fact. They were stunned.
It was that low.
Nobody had ever seen an offer that low. They didn’t know publishers wrote offers that low.
And yet I was still tempted to take it. Parts of it felt shiny—I loved how the sentence, “My publisher in New York . . . (just called/just emailed/moved up my deadline . . . insert literally anything) . . .” sounded and felt. I loved the idea of somebody besides me believing deeply in what I was doing. I loved the idea of somebody else getting my book onto store shelves; of somebody else doing the final editing; of somebody else unpacking the huge cartons full of the first print run.
After more pros and cons lists than I care to admit, I knew it didn’t feel right. But it wasn’t the money. Few write for the money. It was the idea of giving up my creative freedom. Of letting somebody else have a final say in the cover, the title, the quality of paper, and the words, stories, and photos I choose–all the little decisions that will create a feeling when you hold this book. And since I couldn’t put you in my pocket while I was selling tomatoes in Normandy, this is the closest I can come to sharing the magic with you.
Once it’s fully baked, I’ll be thrilled if it finds a publishing partner, but I’ll be equally excited to publish it myself. Because all that really matters is that what I create brings both you and me joy. And instead of telling you about my triumph after-the-fact, I thought it would be more fun to bring you along real-time so we can experience this ride together (it’s not all gonna be powdered sugar and rosé).
(And because now that I’ve said it out loud, I really have to do it.)
For the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some behind the scenes of what we’re experiencing and capturing in France right here in your inbox, and well, if you want the nitty nitty gritty—hop on over to Instagram to watch live as the adventure unfolds.
From the bottom of my little croissant-lovin’ heart, thank you for being on this journey with me.